And that was the way it was with Truman saying, “Not here, I can promise you,” because already he was beginning to turn in on himself and shut me and the rest of the world—including Carly—out. It was slight, of course, nothing I could have seen. But I kept envisioning things for Truman: doctor, lawyer, veterinarian, architect, teacher, landscape designer, interior designer. It wasn’t as if I didn’t still think one of those things would happen when he was older. At one point I even thought he would become a senator, Senator Engroff, but it was just that it was no longer in our hands at all. It was, like all things pertaining to Truman, his alone. Truman in his room thinking whatever it was he was always thinking and never letting us know.
Just as it was that last night. Ethan and I were in the kitchen drinking wine, thinking about making love later, and Truman came in smelling of a fresh shower, his hair combed back, still wet so the blond was darker. He came in and neither of us—I won’t accuse Ethan alone of this—neither of us asked where he was going. We’d become accustomed to not asking, but to relying on his magnanimity—that’s how we’d begun to feel—to share what was going on in his life. Or sometimes we’d ask but we had to wait for the right time, like when I was a teenager waiting for the right time to ask my parents to borrow the car or stay over at a friend’s house. I’d watch for when both my parents were jolly with drinks before dinner, or listening to music or reading books and didn’t want to be bothered with wrangling over the wheres or whens, and it was like that with Truman, gauging when he did and did not want to share even a miniscule part of his world.
If it
were
the right time, he would become garrulous, even rambling, and I would bask in those times. It was like the moment a headache subsides and one’s normal, pain-free existence resumes. And we didn’t go around on our tiptoes as some parents do. I didn’t want any of these pedestrian-thinking people who might get a trickle of information about my Truman determining he was obstreperous, or that we were frightened of him. It was not like that. Truman was private. We lived in a house where privacy was respected. We all knew when and when not to ask particular questions about one another’s lives. Truman learned it from us, of course, but he became more that way than us. He was mostly private, he mostly wanted to be left alone with his own thoughts, mostly unable or reluctant to share.
One year Ethan got it in his head to take me to Wellsboro, Pennsylvania.
“It’s the Grand Canyon of the East Coast, Amy. We have to go see it, the Pine Creek Gorge. No one should miss out on this.”
Ethan would get these ideas, and act on them, and I must admit it was thrilling. One year he took me to Nova Scotia. We’d already been to Paris, London, Prague, Rome—all the predictable places—and Ethan thought we should fly to Halifax for a week. It was funny because that time the one-star general watched Truman. Truman must’ve been five, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to stick him with his great-grandfather for six days, but the one-star’s second wife, Hannah, was still alive at the time, and she was sweet and smart, and she loved Truman, sending him exotic gifts at Christmas from places all over the world, with handwritten and hand-drawn cards (those cards must be in Truman’s room somewhere).
But this time, the time we went to the Grand Canyon in Pennsylvania, we were taking Truman. Bringing him was my idea, even though he was fifteen and could have stayed home alone with the Rodenbaughs just down the road. I wasn’t exactly worried about him drinking—Truman could drink anytime he wanted with us, and he wasn’t particularly interested—but he’d been hanging around with boys a little older than he—Logan Marsh for instance—and I was worried he’d let them congregate at our house. Thinking back on that decision I feel bad, because Truman was devastated by our insistence that he go.
“I’m fifteen, for Christ’s sake. I can take care of myself!”
“It’s not you I’m worried about, Truman. It’s other people.”
“Who’s ‘other people?’ Logan? He’s older than I am. He’s not interested in partying or having parties. He’s going to Columbia next year, for God’s sake.”
But the truth was I thought Logan was gay and I was worried about him and Truman sleeping together. I wanted Truman to experience sex with someone…yes, of course the ideal person would’ve been Carly, probably had been Carly, but anyone his age if it were going to be a boy, and sometime down the road. No. I was not in denial of Truman being gay. I just wanted him to make certain. I wanted him not to regret his actions. I don’t know if Ethan agreed. I think he wanted Truman to stay home so we could hike alone, stay in a room alone, eat at restaurants and drink whiskey in the afternoon alone. But he didn’t say anything. Truman was in the back of the SUV, headphones on all the way to Wellsboro. The country going there on Route 80 was subtly splendid, like most of the Northeast.
It was early spring and there was snow still lingering once we got to the Pocono Mountains. And the weekend was beautiful. Sunny every day, with the wonderful breeze of early spring pushing through the bare branches, the fat buds on the tips only a few warm days away from opening into a greenness of maturity. I watched Truman and Ethan as they walked ahead of me on the trails, and I wondered if they were conspiring, speaking about my distrust of Truman alone in our house for four days, and I wanted to shout down to them, “He’s only fifteen! We could be reported by some concerned neighbor.”
But that wasn’t why I didn’t want him there alone. I didn’t want him to not want Carly. There. I said it. Or some other beautiful girl so Ethan and I could have a grandchild when we were older and Truman would be compelled to come visit us. I was afraid that, when he went off to college, graduated from college, he would be gone from us for good. I mean, we would see him, of course, but he certainly wouldn’t want to come back to Persia, and I couldn’t blame him. He hated living here, hated these people with their narrow views of the world.
“It’d be different if they weren’t educated. If they were like those families that still have farms and are isolated by their own lives and work.”
These were the moments when I wanted to put my arms around my only son and hold him close to me so I could be reminded that he’d once been part of me.
Those days were really the last days we ever had with Truman alone. And they were tainted by the fact that Truman was reluctant to go, listened to his headphones the entire trip there, never once raising his head so he could see the magnificence of the mountains, the rolling hills of moribund farms with cattle and patches of snow scattered on the hillside. It seemed to me, too, that Ethan was oblivious, as so often he was, of Truman’s actions. That is, until they huddled together on the paths leading down to Pine Creek and I was left to wonder if they were talking about me, about my intractability. I knew Truman; I knew he was relentless when he had an issue, and he could usually sway Ethan. They didn’t know how alike they were and I had to laugh when I saw their two heads together, the two Engroff heads, conspiring.
I paid little attention, though. Ethan was right. It was breathtaking. Who would’ve ever thought that Pennsylvania had such beautiful country to offer? We’d never been to the “real” Grand Canyon. Ethan had wanted to go, but I wasn’t interested in different colors of rock. I loved trees. I loved green and fecund lushness. Ethan, I told him more than once, could go on his own. I wouldn’t object.
Pine Creek Gorge wasn’t crowded. We wended our way down to the river easily. Over the years, I imagined, the river had carved out this great canyon with its delicate vista of trees, the myriad of buds and their colors creating a more subtle and prettier effect than the colors of fall. Even at fifteen Truman could appreciate the beauty of the place, and I could tell as we walked along that he’d temporarily abandoned his campaign to be angry about his forced captivity.
I have pictures of the weekend, mostly of Truman and Ethan arm in arm, but there is one on the main street of Willsboro of a large sign, TRUMAN BANK, and even though Truman was reluctant, I made him stand below the sign and I took a picture. If I took it out right now, I could close my eyes before it and describe how he looked: his slumped, disinclined shoulders; the smile that is his power with people; his full lips; the softness of his cheeks, hued a pink from the cold; his hair black (this was what he called his “black period,” and I suppose I should have expected him to be gloomy during the trip); his muscular frame in a sweater with a white T-shirt underneath; his neck long and elegant like Ethan’s; his hands raw and rough from the cold, boy’s hands even though Ethan said they were effeminate; holes in the knees of his jeans, cinched with a belt too long, the end halfway down his crotch; and old black-and-white Keds sneakers, one shoe unlaced, the laces muddied and wet from the walk from the hotel to the restaurant to the TRUMAN BANK. Sockless.
I can’t look at it, though. I can’t look at anything that reminds me of Truman and the future. Him standing there under that sign was representative of mine and Ethan’s faith that Truman would go on, outlive us, become something that would make him happy in the future. Why else would we have made him go that weekend? If we’d known, if I’d known he’d only had so much time left, I would never have forced him to go. I didn’t want Truman to regret his actions for those few days and the fact that he would have to take that into his future. I was afraid he would experience sex with another boy, someone older. Someone who wasn’t Carly.
But what difference would it have made? What difference if Truman had remained home and learned something about himself that probably had been plaguing him for most of his young life? Instead, the only thing I have is pictures of a desultory Truman with his father. There is not one picture of Truman and me from those four days, which is an accurate reflection of my experience: It was as if I was outside looking in at a time that I hoped would erase one possibility for Truman that I didn’t want him to know.
But in truth, who was I to make that decision? Did he ever really know who he was as a sexual creature? He went to New York on his own, but did he experience that part of life that is so essential for all of us? I don’t know, and neither does Ethan. Nor do we know any of what the future might have held for him. He pulled into himself after those four days like a green leaf exposed to a flame. And who were these people in this vile town who defined my Truman by their own myopic standards? I remember some passage by Faulkner—is it in
Big Woods
? I don’t remember now—where he describes the first people to come and denude the land he loved with a Bible and whiskey in one hand and a gun in the other…something like that. I think of Persia when I’m reminded of that passage.
They have taken my lovely son from me. They have robbed him of his future. They’ve robbed me of my future. God damn them, God damn these loathsome people. God damn all of them.
Ethan
Four weeks after Truman’s death
I was not a good father. I should’ve been a better father, and the more I think about that fact the angrier I get. Here’s what I think: I think that it was only a matter of a few years and I would’ve seen how much I wasn’t in Truman’s life and I would’ve wanted to do something about that. But now I can’t and the more I think about it the more I want the person who has done this to our relationship, to the potential of our relationship, our newfound relationship—I want that person to die. Not that it was newfound yet. But it would have been. I knew that when we went to the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania. Wellsboro. It was one of those moments when I connected with my son, and the more I look at the pictures from that trip, the more I know he felt the same way.
“He’s sensitive, Ethan. He’s not as resilient as you are.”
I hated when Amy said that kind of thing to me. She made it sound as if he were so bruised by the world he wouldn’t be able to navigate through life without our constant attention.
“Jesus Christ, Amy. He’s gay. It doesn’t mean he’s a cripple. He is going to go into the world soon and he has to be prepared for all that’s out there.”
“Yes, and he can’t do that without you by his side. I know he feels like you’re never there. You’re always somewhere else, with your business or reading your history books or…”
“Don’t make me a criminal, Amy. You make me feel bad enough with your accusations that I’ve abandoned our relationship.”
We were in bed at the time, it was a weekend morning, and it was one of those moments when I know we both felt as if the days ahead would be quiet and lovely, streaming by like great, white, puffy clouds. But because Amy had lately become convinced I wasn’t enough in Truman’s life, I also had this sense of dread as I lay in bed with her.
“What do you want me to do, Amy?”
“I can’t answer that for you. You have to know what to do.”
“I’m a little confused. My relationship with Truman is headed in the wrong direction because the one you have with him is perfect. Have I framed the problem correctly?”
“I didn’t say that. I said you need to spend more time with Truman. You wouldn’t dare suggest I have the same situation with Truman as you do.”
“No, I wouldn’t say that. But we’re different people. Truman would think something was wrong if I suddenly spent all of my time trying to impose on his privacy.”
“Ha!” she said. “Is that what you think I do? Wade in on his privacy?”
“No, Amy, I wasn’t saying that at all. You do see Truman as sensitive, very sensitive, and so you’re always looking for ways that he is wounded by the world.”